Dentry negativity

Posted Mar 13, 2020 10:41 UTC (Fri) by hkario (subscriber, #94864)
In reply to: Dentry negativity by bokr
Parent article: Dentry negativity

when you have literally thousands upon thousands of applications that exhibit this kind of behaviour, it's far simpler to fix it in one place than in thousands

Dentry negativity

Posted Mar 13, 2020 19:32 UTC (Fri) by bokr (guest, #58369) [Link] (2 responses)

I would agree if it were a "fix," but it is not.
How does that "fix" provide a path to better next versions
of those "thousands upon thousands of apps"? It doesn't.

It lets app developers continue with bad design, perhaps
even unwittingly, because the clever file system implementers
have hidden the worst effects of the bad app (or lib used) design.

It's great to optimize file operations and make bad apps usable, but it
doesn't "fix" them :)

Dentry negativity

Posted Mar 13, 2020 20:33 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

Blaming application developers is futile. As the article shows, even a trivial "hello world" program like /usr/bin/echo goes traipsing all over the filesystem looking for locale files, shared libs, and so on. I very much doubt the actual GNU Coreutils source for echo has any of those lookups in its main(). This is a libc problem. Wearing my sysadmin hat for a moment, I do not want to deal with the flag day that will ensue when libc removes all of those lookups in favor of (something else).

Dentry negativity

Posted Mar 16, 2020 12:21 UTC (Mon) by hkario (subscriber, #94864) [Link]

... and the problem with security issues is that developers need more education.

If only we did find some time in the past 50 years to teach them, we would eliminate them completely! /s

It's not only libc problem, as the article pointed out there are others that do the same, like NSS, and thus Firefox.